Fightin' Dems

Picture the Conservative Mind

One of the joys of owning a motorcycle is that stores send you catalogues of parts, duds and paraphernalia. It's fun to look over all the little toys you can get for your baby. But there is the occasional page, like the one accompanying this entry that is utterly perplexing. This example is not at all unusual, since you may be wondering. It’s a successful marketing arrangement, judging by how often you see versions of it. Anyway, take a moment and let your eyes soak in all the symbolism on this page, symbols juxtaposed without any sense of discomfort. So who are they targeting? There may be a moderate or a liberal out there with a keen sense of irony who would buy from this collection, but I'm going to take a wild stab these patches are not for them. No, we all know that these patches are meant for your basic garden-variety conservative, you know, the "guy with the confederate flag on his pickup" that Howard Dean hopes to attract to the Democratic Party.

Try to form a picture in your head. The guy who's buying from this page may be wearing the flag of the United States, the flag of those who wanted to tear the nation in two, and an iron cross, which, to put it frankly, is the sensitive guy's version of a swastika. Farther up the page, though not shown here, is a patch for Vietnam vets; didn't German soldiers get iron crosses for killing American servicemen in two world wars? It kind of makes you wonder just what about the United States these shoppers like, they who are so quick to wave the flag in our faces. As far as I can tell from these clashing symbols, they like everything about this country except its current makeup and form of government.

But I admit that's a little mean-spirited. Probably most of these folks buying these patches are pretty decent people (they like motorcycles for one thing). They probably just haven't thought it through. They wave the flag the way they wave giant foam fingers at football games. It's fun to take sides and shout. The conservatives have sold their image as tough guys, and we all love tough guys, don't we? Who are they going to root for, the side that wants them to stop and reflect on what they're doing and saying? Where's the fun in that?

The ability to live in the complete bliss of Contradiction is a strength of today's conservatives, from their denial of scientific method to their pick-and-choose reading of the Bible. The Republicans have learned that they can say one thing and do another. More than that, even caught red-handed doing "another", they can say "one thing" even louder and get away with it. No one's keeping them honest, because no one's thinking things through. I mean we the people, of course, but more than this, the Press.

posted by Max Post @ 1:10 PM